Thank you, young man.
I spent most of my lovely afternoon
in Tucson in Laynie Browne's house writing
about membranes, so--
totally psychic.
Thank you to the Poetry Center and to Laynie
for hosting me in her home.
It's lovely to be here.
I shall read tonight from "Humanimal,"
which is a non-fiction project based
upon the true story of two girls, Kamala and Amala,
who were found living with wolves in 1921 in India.
And I went there to India and found the places
where they had been kept, where they
were rescued when they were found by a missionary called
Joseph Singh.
I found his house.
I found his grandson and his great grandson,
and they gave me photographs of the wolf girls.
And I went into the jungle a little ways.
So some of this is more related to filmmaking, and part of it,
I suppose, through scar tissue, through the liquefied
form a body can take.
In certain parts the wolf girls' bodies
connect to the bodies of my father as a child in India.
So I'm going to read it from various places.
So I don't know if it will be clear where I am.
Oh, dear.
Can I borrow a clock, a watch?
Thank you.
It's 8:40 PM.
This will be all over by 8:58 PM.
[INAUDIBLE]
Right.
There are two spaces in which I took notes
for this project, an investigation
of feral childhood.
I'm not sure if childhood is the correct word.
The first space was a blue sky fiction,
imagining a future for a child who died.
The second space was real in different ways,
a double envelope, fluid digits, scary.
I was frightened, and so I stopped.
There were two kiosks like hard bubbles selling tickets
to the show.
A feral child is freakish.
With all my strength, I pushed the glass doors
shut, ignoring the screams of the vendors
inside, with a click.
I clicked the spaces closed, and then,
because I had to, because the glass broke, I wrote this.
"Humanimal 1.
Blue Sky Fiction for a Future Child."
Balled up with her shaven head and spine visible
through her skin, the wolf girl was a singular presence, almost
butter yellow against the granular fabric of the Kodak
paper.
When she died, it was Easter, the hot, dry month
before monsoon.
Bowing to custom, the priest covered her face
with marigolds, soaked the stems with olive oil,
then lit a match.
Behind the graveyard was a church, intensely white
in the pale pink day.
Behind the church was the jungle.
At the edge of the jungle was a seam, a dense shedding
of light green ribbons of bark.
A place where things previously separate
moved together in a wet pivot.
I stood and walked towards it in a dream.
Her eyes were grim, intensely clarified against her charred
skin as she looked up.
Above her the trees were dense with a dark green fruit
I could not identify.
In the minutes before capture, the girl reached up,
her arms criss-crossing rapidly beneath
the bleached low hanging vines of the perimeter.
She was wearing a white cotton dress shredded
at the sleeve and hem.
When I developed the film in New Delhi,
the x-ray of a marine skeleton was
superimposed on her left arm, her elbow as thick as a knot.
I said it was cartilage-- the body incubating
a curved space, an animal self.
Instead of hands she had four streaks of light.
An imprimatur, she saw me and flinched.
Humanimal 2.
A matrix of fluid digits images.
Of children in the underworld, An alphabet to
O a kind of mouth.
1.
The humanimal sky is copper like lids.
Retrograde stars litter this intimate metallic curve
above the jungle.
Can you see it?
A. All the branches stir in their silver.
Like a liquid metal--
the jungle.
For her, the girl-- tenticular.
Does the skin crepe, where her fingers are too wet,
trailing in the river?
This is what a child does as in fairy tales.
This is walking.
I want to.
All branches fear life.
It pushes and pushes--
life.
Out to the tips where the color is.
Does this happen in Asian forests?
Does this tree say yes, damaged by its yes,
to phloem, the food to the lips?
Of the branches where the leaves are and thus a leaf girl,
leaping from branch to branch in her dream
of being a girl and not this, this other disastrous thing.
2.
Like automata, the trees rise up in rows mechanically.
Because it's January we don't see scat or paw marks or tufts
of blue hair caught in the low lying branches.
This is tracking, but the wolves,
wild black dogs with elongated torsos, are deeper in.
The district forest officer lifts a luminous skin
from a termite mound with the snout of his rifle
and holds it up to show me.
When I reach out to gather another section of the skin,
he stops my hand with his.
When I ask if snakes are active at this time of year,
he says, Oh, no.
No, Madam.
The Indian Anaconda is not a problem at this time of year.
Not at all.
No problem.
Nevertheless we return in short order
to the Jeep with footage only of a rudimentary perimeter
in which giant insects have constructed
conical temples in the moist ochre earth beneath the trees.
I want to stay, but the filmmakers are stubbing out
their cigarettes in the dirt.
I didn't know the jungle would be red.
B. I want to stand up, but I can't do that here.
They would know I am a wolf by my sore hips,
the look in my eyes.
At the edge of the garden was a line of blue chalk.
My mother was waiting there, waiting for me
in her dark coat.
In the dream I walk towards her, and she stands up.
She opens up her coat like two wings,
and I step into her cloth heart, her cleft of matted fur.
3.
The girl.
I cannot retrieve even one foot from her small leg, a tendon,
a nail, one eye.
I saw her grave in the city where the edge had been.
In your city or where you grew up, was there an overgrown
scrubland?
Was there a tree?
Imagine a dark tree like a lemon tree, its fruit still green
and studded with green parrots.
The edge of sal.
Lemon and banana plantings intermixed
with the regular blue.
It is blue leaves at night and brown yellow,
or doubly green by day.
But it was day, but blue.
I put my hand on her grave and waited
until I could feel the rhythm faintly of breathing,
of a cardiac output.
C. Mist rose in cubes.
With hard fingers they tore strips from my spine.
All.
Blond black fur All hair from a previous life.
4.
Feral children are fatty, complex, and rigid.
When you captured the two children,
you had to brush the knots out of their hair,
then scrape the comb free of hard butter.
Descent and serration.
No.
I don't want to ask primal questions.
5.
Kamala slips over the garden wall with her sister
and runs on all fours towards the complex horizon
between Midnapore and its surrounding belt of sal.
The humanimal mode is one of pure anxiety attached
to the presence of the body.
Two panicked children strain against the gelatin envelope
of the township, producing through
distention a frightening shape.
The animals see an opaque, milky membrane
bulging with life and retreat, as you would,
to the inner world.
I am speakiong to you in January.
It is raining.
Amniotic, compelled to emerge, the girls
are nevertheless reabsorbed.
I imagine them back in their cots
illuminated by kerosene lanterns.
I illuminate them in the colony, the cluster of residences
including the home around St John's.
No.
Though I've been there, it's impossible for me
to visualize retrieval.
Chronologies only record the bad days, the attempted escapes.
D. I was almost to the gate.
I was almost to the gate when a hand reached out and pulled me
backwards by my hair, opening my mouth to an O. The next day
I woke up with a raw throat.
The cook gave me salt in warm water.
I waited until she was gone, and then I bit it.
I bit my own arm, and I ate it.
Here is my belly frosted with meat
Here are my eyes, bobbling in a tin.
6.
It's Palm Sunday, and Kamala, with the other orphans
in a dark, glittery crocodile, walks from home to church.
Her two arms extend stiffly from her body
to train them to extend.
Unbound, her elbows and wrists would flex, then supinate,
like two peeled claws.
Wrapped, she is a swerve, a crooked yet regulated mark.
This is corrective therapy.
The fascia hardening over a lifetime
then split in order to reset it, educate the nerves.
E. The cook fed us meat of many kinds.
I joined my belly to the belly of the next girl.
It was pink, and we opened our beaks for meat.
It was wet, and we licked the dictionary
off each other's faces.
7.
Is this the humanimal question?
No.
It's a disc transferring light from corner
to corner of the girl's eye.
Like an animal tapetum, the way at night
an animal, animal eyes glinting in the room where he kept her,
his girl, deep in the home.
8.
Where is the future child?
Curled up with wolves, sub red, the wolf girl's eyes
reflected light.
She was seven when her father found her coiled in a den.
A tall extremely handsome father sidetracked from his mission,
dressed in black despite the heat, caught her in a bed sheet
and wrote, I cut a hole and removed her from the cave.
8.
Your scars lit up, then liquefied.
Lucidity, holographically, your heart pulsed in the air next
to your body.
Then my eyes clicked the photo into place.
Future child, in the time you lived, in your arms
always itched and flaked.
To write this, the memoir of your body,
I slipp my arms into the sleeves of your shirt.
I slipp my arms into yours to become four limbed.
And I should pause there.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]